by Ian Hamilton
His first reaction was disbelief. Then it dawned on him that I would not have spoken as I had done had we not succeeded in some measure at least. Even then he did not believe in our complete success. At best, surely, all we had done was broken into the Abbey and moved the Stone. It was beyond the most intense optimism that we had succeeded entirely. At once he telephoned John MacCormick. In carefully guarded terms he told him that I had telephoned and claimed success. I can imagine the reply in a rather cold, almost uninterested voice. ‘Oh yes, Bill.’ And he would go on playing Christmas games with his children, while his mind slipped its clutch with excitement. When he could find a moment he would slip away from his family and telephone Councillor Gray.
In an hour or so the Christmas programmes on the radio were interrupted to give the news. I am told that Scotland spent one of the most excited Christmases it had had for years. John’s flat was besieged by reporters, and Councillor Gray had to fend them off as best he could. From that day onward they both answered all questions with calm irony, which, if it did not avert suspicion, gave nothing away. Thus while the police combed Britain for the criminals, the men behind the men they sought sat quietly in Glasgow and issued press statements.
But at that time on Christmas Day we were too near the reality to be bothered with press statements. We could not know the extent of the furore we had caused, because we had no radio, and there were no English newspapers on Christmas Day. We hoped that the interest would be great, for that was one of our intentions. The time would come when our tongues would go into our cheeks, and we would talk and speculate and lay bets as to where the Stone was hidden, but that irony lay in the future. We still had a lot to do.
After making the telephone call I drove on west. There was a pleasure in driving on such a morning, but I began to feel that perhaps I was being overcautious in laying down a false trail. Policemen and even police stations had no radios in those days, and it took them many hours to marshal their men and call them in from their homes, but I did not know the difficulty they were having. I did not wish to underestimate their powers of deduction, and I had worked all morning on the assumption that they would connect the four Scots and the two cars outside Kay’s hotel with the disappearance of the Stone only an hour or two later. I think it was a reasonable assumption, but as I drove on I became increasingly aware that I had been passed by one or two police cars, none of which had shown the slightest interest in me. What if I were to reach Wales without the police paying any attention to me? Was I to sit there inactive and wait to be arrested? I decided that, in the absence of a police hunt, the best thing I could do was to return to Reading and help Alan and Gavin to retrieve the Stone. It was a wise decision to take. Had I continued to give the police credit for the intelligence I thought they possessed, I would have arrived helplessly in Wales, and Alan would have had the whole responsibility for removing the Stone, because Gavin never arrived in Reading.
Before turning the car and heading back the way I had come, I stopped at a little pub high on the downs above Marlborough. It was half an hour before twelve o’clock when they opened officially, but they let me in and gave me a big plate of bread and mutton, which I ate with relish, as I was starving. Their radio was in their private quarters, so I was unable to hear the news, and after drinking a bottle of beer when opening time came I headed back the way I had come.
Alan was waiting at Reading station when I arrived. He too had only had a sandwich, and we drove round the town looking for a hotel to give us lunch, but they were all booked for Christmas dinners so there was no room at the inns. We had a note of the times of all the trains from London and we met each one, our hope dwindling as we saw no sign of Gavin. We waited, cold and hungry and tired, until half past four, and then pressed the starter and headed back for London and the Stone.
It was still light when we reached London, so we went for a wash and a meal. The job we had to do could only be done in darkness. We parked the car in a side street off Piccadilly and went into a restaurant. We were fighting shy of Whitehall and the Strand, where we had eaten many times in the last few days. At the next table a group of two men and two women were talking loudly about the remarkable happenings in the Abbey, so we kept our Scots accents muted. Feeling like new men, we went back to the car, but before we set out for the Dover Road we stopped at a telephone box and I put through another call to Bill. He was jubilant.
‘Never mind talking in riddles,’ he said when I started to use the cumbersome code. ‘They can’t be tapping every line to Scotland. There’s nothing else in the papers or on the radio, except what you’ve done. The Border roads have roadblocks on them for the first time in 400 years, and the whole of Scotland is mad with excitement. There are two descriptions out. I can recognise them but they’re not a hundred per cent. How are you standing up to it?’
‘Fine,’ I said. I could have listened to him all night.
‘Well lie low,’ he said. ‘And good luck.’ Then we rang off and Alan telephoned his people. In guarded terms he explained where he was, and what he had been up to. They were astounded. They thought he had been at a wedding.
We climbed back into the car and headed for the Stone. At the back of our minds lay a worry for Gavin. His absence seemed inexplicable. We consoled ourselves with the knowledge that he must still be free. Had the police arrested him, it would have been in the Glasgow papers. The papers had been full of the Stone, but had said nothing about any arrest.
So the publicity started. It has haunted me for the rest of my life. The unco guid were tearing their raiment on both sides of the Border, for there is no one quicker to take affront at an insult to Britain than an Anglicised Scot, unless the insult comes from an Englishman. Those people I had overheard at the next table in the restaurant were ordinary English people, and they were speaking in laughing delight at what had happened. They saw in it a relief from the tension of the wars and strikes and hunger and famine that daily filled the papers.
I was beginning to get the feeling that it went even further than that. Perhaps in Scotland we were reviving the spirit that has kept us the oldest unconquered nation in Europe, indeed a nation that has never known conquest. Now, more than ever, we needed to make that spirit felt at home and abroad. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries had crowded the ordinary man into a system, and labelled him, and ticketed him, and made him anonymous. We four had shown that classification had gone too far and we had burst through into the unclassified and, I hoped, the unclassifiable. In doing this I wanted to think that we had done something for England as well; for the wee ordinary men and women of the two nations. Although we are different we should also be friends. Mediocrity and acquiescence in the status quo have for too long been the ingredients of success. That is what makes you grand, pot-bellied and solemn. We had poked the pot bellies in the ribs and made them gasp. We had done something for the wee men, because that is what we were ourselves, three wee men and a girl. While the big ones howled, and the police went into a flutter, the wee men of both nations laughed and laughed. Laughter and a pinch of salt are better than bombs any day, and we had set the world to laughter.
Chapter Fifteen
Twenty-four hours earlier we could have called the whole thing off and gone home to live with nothing worse than our private shame at our failure. Up until then, all that had driven us on had been the desire to serve; the same desire which had made me volunteer for the armed forces of the crown as a schoolboy in time of war. Now we had gone further and assumed a responsibility, and once assumed, responsibilities can never quite be shaken off. What we had done had passed from the private to the public, and we had to see the business through to the end. The temptation to run for home was a very real one, and I would never blame anyone who has the sense to run away from anything. I bolt whenever I decently can, but the Stone had to be moved, so we did not bolt. We had to put the Stone somewhere it would never be found. That was our plain duty.
As we drove south, our resolution solidified. We
would pick up the Stone and hide it as quickly as possible, since we still feared that the police were looking for the car. We were fortunate to find our way without too much difficulty, and were thus able to dispose of a secret fear that we both held. It would have been irony indeed if we had been unable to locate the hiding place. However, before long we came downhill to the roadhouse, which was alive with Christmas parties. We left it behind us and drove on into the frost and cold, feeling not a bit envious, and, indeed, insufferably smug, because we were living while the party-goers were acting out a charade of festivity because the calendar told them to. When we came to our side road, we slowed down because the lights of a car shone brightly behind us. We wanted no witnesses. When the car passed we pulled up the road and switched our lights off.
It was a frosty night with only a slight threat of mist in the air. The sky was hazy with the lights of 8 million people, and the nearer darkness was more intense by comparison. We prepared the car for the Stone and climbed over the fence with the fear for noise which darkness brings. People whisper at night.
The Stone was exactly where we had left it, and we set about manoeuvring it up the slope to the waiting car. The first tug on it almost broke our hearts. It seemed part of Mother Earth, yet we had moved it before and we could move it again. The grass was slippery, and that did not make the job any easier. At one point the Stone slipped from our hands and tobogganed back down the slope. We could have cried with vexation, and I lay down for a moment forgetful of the cold and wet, tired beyond understanding. Then we attacked it again and somehow got it up over the brow of the hill, down the slope and into the car.
Our next job was to find a hiding place. We were somewhere in Kent, a county of which we knew little except that hops grew there. Presumably it was open country.
We turned south and drove for 20 miles; then we cut off right, into what we hoped was open country. We drove for miles. The whole countryside was a maze of hedge-lined lanes and narrow sunken roads, which wound from signpost to signpost and never lost sight of a house. It was suburbia in the countryside, and we began to get desperate.
A dozen times we stopped the car to look at a likely place, only to discover it was somebody’s back garden. We laughed rather worriedly at the idea of hiding it in some rich stockbroker’s shrubbery, and at what he would say to the police and they to him, and who would say it first. We drove on for weary miles, pulled up a steep hill, the engine complaining in first gear at the weight of the Stone, crept cautiously down the other side and came on more and still more houses.
For half an hour Alan had been arguing that the main road was the best place. ‘Hide it where they’ll least expect it,’ he urged, but I would not listen to him. I feared discovery by the chance passer-by. Now, however, when I saw how densely populated the district was, I knew he was right and fell into agreement with him. The problem was how to get back into the main road, because we were hopelessly lost, and our large-scale touring map was of little use to us. At length by luck, and by diligently reading the signposts, we found it and turned south.
In this wilderness of suburbs I was suddenly homesick. I thought of my own underpopulated country, and how easy it would be to hide an army in it. I saw the Braes up behind Paisley where I had been born, and remembered the greyness of them in winter when the south-west wind came in from Ailsa Craig and the rain washed them and bent the rough grass flat. That was a country where a man had room to move and think without trespassing on his neighbour’s garden or thinking his neighbour’s thoughts. I thought of the island of Arran, which hangs like a mirage far beyond Renfrewshire, but clear in the grey sea on a good day. I had gone there on holiday once. You could tramp over the hills all day and see nothing but the heather and the green bracken; you could watch the rain come in over the Kilbrannan Sound and wipe Goat Fell clean off the picture. I wondered if any of these men of Kent had ever seen the blush of green bracken on the throat of a hill. If they had not, I pitied them.
It was a far cry from the hills to this place and we knew it well. Half a mile down the road we stopped and looked around us. Anything was better than to drive until dawn brought arrest. It seemed to our strained nerves that to make the effort of hiding the Stone was better than to drive aimlessly. On the south side of the road was a stretch of grass, perhaps 20 paces across; beyond this was a clump of bushes in which a sparrow would have looked like an eagle. With the optimism born of fear we dragged the Stone across and thrust it into the undergrowth, only to drag it back, laughing at our folly, to fight down the fear and panic which was rising in our throats. Were we never going to come to an end?
We let in the clutch and drove east, thinking of the seashore. A few miles further on we passed the outline of aircraft hangars on our right and shortly after came to a line of trees. Alan stopped the car and I ran over to examine the place.
It was ideal. The road at this point was 10 yards out from the trees, and beyond the fence the ground sloped steeply down an embankment to a wood. The embankment was overgrown, and littered with dead leaves, windblown straw, and scraps of paper. Above all a quick scratch with my hand showed that the leaves had kept the frost from penetrating the ground, so that the earth was soft, and could easily be hollowed away to make a bed for the Stone.
I went back to Alan and again we manhandled the Stone from the car. We had almost worn away the upholstery, but that was the least of our worries. We took the map with us, and whenever a car passed, as we worked our way across the grass strip, we sat on the Stone and consulted the map, hoping that we did not look too conspicuous. Sitting in the black dark reading a map, we did not look in any way conspicuous. We looked plain daft. It was a measure of our tiredness. We dragged the Stone under the fence, and halfway down the slope I hollowed a recess in the earthy mould. We lifted the Stone bodily into it, and covered it first with earth, then with leaf mould and straw, and then with papers. In the dim of the night we stood back to admire our handiwork. We were certain we had done a good job.
We returned to the car and drove on to Rochester. We were not sure exactly where we were and we wanted to get a fix on a large town. In five minutes we came to the outskirts and determined to get a meal, or a drink at least, since we were far from home and very tired. To our surprise the pub we approached was closed. We asked a passer-by the time and he indicated the clock on a church steeple, which showed it was after midnight. Dismayed at the lateness of the hour we set off back the way we had come, but before we did we searched the car for incriminating evidence. The iron bar to which we had hoped to lash the Stone on our first attempt was all we had left. We had wrapped it up in crepe paper to make it look like a Christmas gift if we had to carry it through the streets. We ripped the paper off it and left it lying behind the pub. I expect it is there still.
Leaving the pub we checked the milometer on the car, and rechecked it as we passed the spot where the Stone was hidden. We were two and a half miles distant from Rochester. Our duties ended, I lay along the back seat, and Alan put his toe down for Scotland. We had hidden the Stone where it would never be found. We alone knew where it was hidden, and we were certain that when we were arrested we could get the information out to some fellow Scot. We only hoped that Kay was as fortunate with her piece as we had been with ours.
I lay and slept as I was now very tired. It was not the 90-odd hours since we had been in bed that did it. It was the way we had passed them. They had been hectic. Now that we had discharged our responsibilities I slept like a dead man. As we approached the outskirts of London I woke up and took over. Alan, white-faced and staring, stumbled into the back seat and collapsed. Thus, one sleeping and the other driving, we passed through London. When we reached the open road we both slept in snatches, pulling into the gateway of a field for half an hour, and then one would wake and drive on. It is a journey that is recalled only through a haze of exhaustion. Some time after dawn I wakened and looked around me. We had managed to reach the Great North Road near Biggleswade. Indeed I recognised th
e very spot because I had been stationed near there during my time in the Royal Air Force. We were 50 miles from London, and 80 miles from Rochester. We had taken 8 hours to cover 80 miles, which broke no record. But we were on the way home. Although we had a long way to travel, home was very real to us. Beyond all reason Scotland seemed safe.
Chapter Sixteen
Swiftly I eased myself out into the cold greyness, and the fresh air slapped me across the face. It was a bonny morning and I felt my blood leap at the feel of it. A hoar frost had turned the grass white and softened the brown of the ploughed fields. A morning mist hung over the fat Bedfordshire farmlands, and the sun glowed like a red ball well up in the eastern sky. I stretched and straightened myself, and the knots in my back worked loose. I was terribly glad I was alive.
I had left the door open, and the fresh air wakened Alan. He climbed out wearily and then blinked and smiled.
‘Where are we?’ he asked.
‘Biggleswade,’ I said.
‘How odd!’ He seemed surprised. ‘We’ve come a long way then.’
Since he had driven much of the way the remark shows how tired we were. We got out the map and gleefully studied the road we had come. We could remember little of it. All these miles made good seemed like a prize won in a raffle.
We washed ourselves in the roadside frost and dried ourselves on my towel, which was dirty and clammy and seemed uncivilised compared to the cleanness of the morning. Then we lit cigarettes as though the fresh air was not good enough by itself.
We looked at each other and smiled. Last night’s horror of weariness had passed completely, and what for 24 hours had seemed like a dream we now knew to be reality. We had crossed the Border and raided the very heart of Englishry, and we were returning unscathed, while all around us the authorities gnashed their teeth and held committee meetings. Again and again we went over the details. ‘Remember this! Remember this!’ we cried. We recalled all the incidents, and contrasted our dejection when I had been caught by the watchman with our present elation. There is no feeling quite like the shadowless happiness of the hour after success. We drove off shouting and singing, quite unbalanced with carelessness. We were young and triumphant, and all the glory of the morning was on our lips.
